Phildickian ceremonies, and a bit of melancholy
Maciej is in Warsaw, helping his countrymen celebrate joining the EU:
The screens were projecting some impossibly overproduced television special, most of it in German, which periodically brought in a grinning, bespectacled Polish announcer who stood patiently at the front of our stage. He spoke sometimes in Polish, sometimes in the indeterminately accented World English that will one day take over the planet. The whole show was masterminded back in a German studio, where a tall blonde mistress of ceremonies cut between our own announcer and similar sound stages in seven other capitals (not a hint of Malta or Cyprus, unfortunately). I got a creepy Philip K. Dick watching her, waves of German flowing out from loudspeakers across the Old Town, but it didn't seem to faze the crowd. Once in a while, a Polish translation would kick in, making us appreciate its absence.The announcer brought out Cold War relic Katarina Witt, who looked like she had just been removed from cryogenic storage deep in an East Berlin bunker. Witt confessed to an early crush on some Polish figure skater in the eighties, by way of illustrating why European expansion needed to happen. Our announcer gave a rubber grin and said, in English "But Katerina! While you were falling in love with a Polish ice skater, millions of Polish men were falling in love with you!" Her sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithm responded with a smile.
The melancholy (which a reference to Poland wouldn't be complete without) is this: If you've made the decision to put some kind of diary online, and you mention anything about your personal life, then you somehow have to address what happens when, well, something changes in your personal life. Today's case in point, Maciej and Kirstie's blogs, where Kirstie says:
Only a few minutes left until May. All of the windows and doors in the house are open to the soft spring dark, and the peepers are singing outside. The moon is a high bright ghost. I have had a good green salad and a glass of red wine for my solitary supper. Maciej (the entity formerly known as the mister) is in Poland for the E.U. celebration all month long, and I have got the house blissfully to myself. It is a lovely life, sometimes.
Which I thought might be just a clever turn of phrase, until I saw the link list on Maciej's blog this morning:
Nobody's Doll
The artist formerly known as the better half.
Ah well. I wish them all the best.